The year is coming to a close, and so, we can expect to see plenty of articles and press releases from massive companies celebrating all of their achievements from the last 12 months. While obviously rather vain, it’s often interesting to see what some of the leaders in the tech world have been up to and where they see the next developments coming from.
So, we come to Meta. Formerly Facebook, the social media and tech company have been hard at work trying to develop technology that will bring AI hardware, virtual reality, mixed reality, and their Metaverse to the public. By all accounts, years of development and billions of dollars in investment in R&D are beginning to pay off, paving what might just be a path to realizing their dreams of everyone wearing their tech much of the time.
Big Steps in AI Glasses and the Metaverse
One of the biggest achievements that Meta has been keen to share is that they’ve come a long way with Orion. The AR Glasses were announced as having “arrived” at the end of September, with the developers hailing how the few months of real-life demos thereafter helped to advance the product further than in years of work. On top of the AR Glasses, AI Glasses and mixed reality hardware also took big steps forward.
The AI Glasses began development in 2021. Now, Meta can confirm that glasses are “by far the best form factor” for a device that’s truly an AI-native. Still at the beginning of the S-curve for the product category, in 2025, they expect AI assistants to evolve into much more proactive tools, empowering products like AI Glasses even further.
In the metaverse and, more specifically, Meta’s Metaverse, the team is now deploying an AI model, Meta Motivo, to help advance further developments. The behavioral foundation model has been created to control a virtual humanoid within the virtual space to allow the virtual humanoid to perform complex tasks therein. The tech could, per the Meta team, “pave the way for fully embodied agents… more lifelike NPCs… and new types of immersive experiences.”
Closing in on a Metaverse-centric World
The development of Orion and Motivo, in particular, could revolutionize the virtual world and propel more immersive entertainment experiences. Already, major strides have been made to be ready for this step. The poker reporting site Pokernews has been keeping on top of these advancements alongside covering the best of the action from the live and online poker scene. There, you’ll find a report on how VR poker is set and ready to play as a premium product.
For now, it’s a free form of poker, without real money betting, but as the metaverse rooms of poker grow in popularity, and programs like Motivo make for better and more realistic virtual dealers, it’ll eventually have enough players to support a real money outing. Elsewhere in entertainment, musicians continue to dive into the virtual world, with even Charli XCX extending her SWEAT tour to put on a show in VR via Meta Quest.
Meta was certainly the subject of more than a few jokes when it changed to Meta and announced its Metaverse, but as the years go on and the work continues, their somewhat dystopian future of the virtual world looks to be more and more inevitable.
